The young evangelist continued to preach despite the constant threat of arrest. Yun says God then told him to be His witness "to the south and the west." They prayed all night for their father, and he was healed. The prodigal gathered her five children (Yun was the fourth of five) and told them Jesus would save them. He says his zeal came from his mother, a poor and backslidden woman who, while caring for her cancer-stricken husband and near suicide herself, tearfully turned back to God one night in 1974. It was around this time that a proselytizing 17-year-old Yun first became a wanted criminal in China, having led 2,000 people to Christ in his native Henan Province during his first year as a Christian. Yet when Mao's bloody Cultural Revolution ended with his death in 1976, an underground Christian movement erupted. "By the 1970s, it was said the only Bibles left in China were in history museums in Beijing." "The first thing Mao did was expel all missionaries, throw pastors in prison or labor camps where most of them died, destroy church buildings and burn Bibles," Yun says. But Mao's regime looked to turn back the tide. There were roughly 1 million Christians living in China when Mao Zedong's community army took over in 1949. Later, missionaries such as Hudson Taylor, who founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, carried the gospel into interior provinces such as Henan. The Scottish missionary eventually translated the Bible into Chinese from his base in the coastal city of Guangzhou. Protestant missionary work to South Asia began exactly 200 years ago when Robert Morrison landed in Macao in 1807. In 2003, it won the United Kingdom's Christian Booksellers' Book of the Year Award.īut more than being a testimony of one man's spiritual journey, The Heavenly Man offers a glimpse inside the Chinese underground house-church movement, a Christian community that is poised to reach the world with the gospel.Īlthough the numbers vary, observers estimate between 100 million and 130 million Christians live in China, an indication that nearly 10 percent of the nation's 1.3 billion people may be believers. Thousands have been inspired by his account of supernatural intervention and miraculous survival, which he detailed in his autobiography, The Heavenly Man (Piquant Editions and Monarch Books).Ĭo-authored by Paul Hattaway, the book has been translated into 33 languages and has sold more than 800,000 copies. Today, Liu Zhenying, 49, is known to Christians around the world as Brother Yun (pronounced "Yoon"), a name Chinese believers gave him to protect his identity. He was released four years later but imprisoned and tortured twice more before escaping China in 1997. Liu believed he would soon die for the Lord in that prison, but God had other plans. Then he cried, "I will see you all in heaven!" Liu broke his fast by sharing communion with his family. Only a birthmark convinced Liu's mother that the man she was holding was her son. His ears were shriveled like raisins, and portions of his scalp were exposed because the prison guards had ripped his hair out. He was an unsightly pile of skin and bones, covered in crusty blood and filth. His young wife and sister peered at him in horror. When Liu regained consciousness, his head was in his mother's lap. The Public Security Bureau (PSB), China's secret police, was hoping Liu's wife and mother would convince him to renounce his "superstitious" beliefs and reveal the identities and locations of his unregistered house-church contacts. Although he was 5 feet 5 inches, he weighed less than 70 pounds and had to be carried to a room where officials had arranged for his family to see him. Inside Nanyang Prison, located in China's Henan Province, 25-year-old Liu was beginning the 75 th day of his fast from both food and water. Prison guards, electric-shock batons in hand, stepped back unashamedly as he lost consciousness. Tortured Evangelist Supernaturally Escapes High-Security Prison by Simply Walking Outġ1:00AM EDT Paul Steven Ghiringhelli Brother Yun ( Vimeo/Back to Jerusalem) Liu Zhenying fell to the floor convulsing, his frail body coursing with electricity.
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